DIRECTLY ACROSS the Thames from Whitehall stood Lambeth
Palace, chief of the houses of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It
was fortunate that a medieval archbishop, seeking to escape from
the meddling monks of Canterbury, had acquired Lambeth. Otherwise, it
would have been necessary for the post-Reformation primates of the
Church of England to secure some similarly located property where the
spiritual head of the Church could have ready access to its political head,
the monarch.

Whitehall was as important as Lambeth to many a rising Jacobean cleric.
Matters of doctrine or the day-to-day running of the vast ecclesiastical
machine might take a man to Lambeth, but if he were ambitious for a
deanery or a bishopric, his shortest path was by way of Whitehall and a
chaplaincy to some great lord, if not to the King himself.

The occupant of Lambeth when King James came to the English throne
was John Whitgift, Elizabeth's 'little black husband'. Old and grey now,
though still implacable in maintaining the claims of the Church, he de-
pended more and more upon Richard Bancroft, the robust and energetic
Bishop of London. Too few of the Church's dignitaries were of the calibre
of Whitgift and Bancroft. Queen Elizabeth's spoliation of the Church
through the sale of bishoprics and deaneries, one of the forgotten scandals
of her reign, had seriously impaired the quality of the hierarchy. Indicative
of how Elizabeth made her bishops pay for promotion by transferring
episcopal estates to her or her favourites was the jest of the Bishop of
Llandaff. That merry prelate liked to refer to himself as the Bishop of Aff,
explaining to everybody that his diocese's land had long since been given
away. When Elizabeth died, she left an episcopacy made up largely of
mediocre careerists, 'court bishops' who would spend much of their time
in obsequious attendance on King James, hoping for translation to richer
sees.

Whitgift and his brother archbishop, Hutton of York, awaited with
anxiety the coming of King James. Could the equipoise which had held
the Church midway between Rome and Geneva be preserved? It was all
very well to maintain that the new king would be only the political, not
the spiritual, head of the Church. With an amateur theologian like James

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